Hillary Clinton Quotes

When the producers of 'Why Poverty?' came to me to do a film about poverty in the United States, I asked if I could do a film about wealth instead. I tend to make films about perpetrators, rather than victims.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Everybody in politics claims to want to get everybody out of poverty. What's the opposite? Wealth. And what is often criticized by the left? Wealth.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

If work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

You don't want Congress peopled by millionaires.

Poor men's words have little weight.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

The possession of wealth does not confer upon the wealthy the right to take advantage of the less fortunate.

We cannot rebuild the American Dream here at home by catering to the voices of the privileged and powerful.

I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

The world belongs to the wealthy, and nowhere is this injustice more apparent than in the workplace.

Increasingly, we're seeing two worlds in Canada. The world for most Canadians is increasingly unaffordable, involves more precarious work, and is a harder place in which to get by. The second world is an exclusive club for the wealthy and well-connected who get special access and are exempt from rules the rest of us play by.

Global poverty is the product of reversible policy failures overseen by politicians, past and present. The poorest of the poor don't vote in American or European elections. They don't make donations to political parties or hire lobbyists in D.C., London or Canberra.

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong.

So much has happened to obscure the dialogue about race and about gender and discrimination in general, especially where those things touch on economics.

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

What I worry about is the lack of understanding in society around the world that there is a divide in the world between those who have and those who do not.